High-order symplectic Lie group methods on $SO(n)$ using the polar decomposition

Abstract: A variational integrator of arbitrarily high-order on the special orthogonal group $SO(n)$ is constructed using the polar decomposition and the constrained Galerkin method. It has the advantage of avoiding the second-order derivative of the exponential map that arises in traditional Lie group variational methods. In addition, a reduced Lie--Poisson integrator is constructed and the resulting algorithms can naturally be implemented by fixed-point iteration. The proposed methods are validated by numerical simulations on $SO(3)$ which demonstrate that they are comparable to variational Runge--Kutta--Munthe-Kaas methods in terms of computational efficiency. However, the methods we have proposed preserve the Lie group structure much more accurately and and exhibit better near energy preservation.